Trump-Kim statement overpromised on return of remains

WASHINGTON» More than a month after North Korea pledged to return some American war dead immediately, the promise is unfulfilled.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who traveled to Pyongyang this month to press the North Koreans further, said Wednesday the return could begin “in the next couple of weeks.” But it could take months or years to positively identify the bones as those of specific American servicemen.

In a joint statement at their Singapore summit, President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un committed to recovering the remains of prisoners of war and those missing in action decades after the Korean War — “including the immediate repatriation of those already identified.”

That was June 12. Although Trump said eight days later that the repatriation had happened, it has not. Stars and Stripes reported from South Korea on Tuesday that the North has agreed to transfer as many as 55 sets of remains next week. The Pentagon and the State Department declined to comment on specifics promised by the North.

“We’re making progress along the border to get the return of remains, a very important issue for those families,” Pompeo said Wednesday at the White House. “I think in the next couple of weeks we’ll have the first remains returned. That’s the commitment, so progress certainly being made there.”

Likely also to prove untrue is the part of the Trump-Kim statement that said the North had war remains “already identified.” It apparently has bones and perhaps personal effects, but history shows any remains handed over by the North are likely to be difficult to identify. In recent days the State Department has changed that phrase to “already collected,” suggesting it realized the remains have not been identified.

“There are no missing Americans who have been ‘already identified’ by (North Korea) to be repatriated,” says Paul Cole, who has researched POW-MIA issues from the Korean War for decades and served for four years as a scientific fellow at the Pentagon’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. He said this element of the Singapore statement “reflects a near total ignorance of the role of science” in accounting for war dead.